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College Costs – Scholarships are now replacing student loans ... for student athletes

Delray Beach, FL – October 5, 2008 - SASF has helped one million families reduce college education costs.

The Student Athlete Scholarships foundation, a volunteer non-profit group teaches BOTH families AND college coaches how to successfully recruit one another. Our foundation, SASF, helps both groups succeed.”

And just when it seemed life couldn’t get any more difficult …. It did.

The current financial crisis is a runaway beast, attacking anything in its path. Devouring home equity, banks, and insurance giants, this week it suddenly struck at all college-bound teenagers when it devoured student loans.

Families now realized that their lifeboat was missing. Though they never wanted to borrow for college expenses they always knew they could, if all else failed. And then one day, suddenly the lifeboat and the life preservers were gone … while the ship is swirling in a gigantic financial typhoon.

We are soccer parents in the 90's; and were struck by thousands of college scholarship opportunities created by the rapid growth of soccer, and dramatic college cost increases (CNN: college cost growth surpassed even health care costs.) We began exploring college preparation with our five year old and ten year old daughters.

See: http://www.soccer.com/channels/features.php?story=collegefree It's about the importance of beginning your preparation EARLY.

Our two daughters played soccer, got good grades in school, earned college soccer scholarships, then graduated DEBT FREE into great careers. A college education costs well over $100,000. The average college graduate today faces over $20,000 in undergraduate debts, while costs are still growing at 10% per year.

As our young daughters progressed through school and sports, we took good notes, and with the help of college coaches, wrote about what we were learning ... that was 1 million magazines ago!

Our readers know that college expenses can be offset with money from five different sources:
1. Athletic scholarships
2. Merit scholarships
3. Work/study
4. Grants
5. Debt (but student loans are not currently unavailable)

When we understand that lofty prices asked by colleges (in Forbes Magazine’s America’s 50 Colleges, the top 10 averaged $49,000 per year) are primarily “fixed costs” (facilities and staff) while the “out-of-pocket” (cash) cost to fund a full scholarship student athlete is primarily food, costing only about $1000 per year, at Princeton or Centre College or The College of Charleston or Stanford or Indiana.

For this important reason, the actual cash (out-of-pocket) cost for a student athlete's food is still easily funded by universities, even in these difficult times. In fact, that $1000 may be the best investment a college can make in the marketing of its educational services to the public. College sports sell seats ... seats in the classroom and in the stadium, The most watched college event in the world is always the Army - Navy football game. Colleges know they need sports and they need student athletes to win games.